ZS Principal Shankar Viswanathan has been recognized as one of Analytics India Magazine’s “Top 10 Data Scientists in India” for 2017.

The recent explosion of data science coupled with the growing prevalence of these roles in many industries around the world was the catalyst behind the creation of this year’s list. The publication evaluated India-based data scientists based on experience, knowledge, published work, input from peers and overall contribution to the analytics industry in India, narrowing the list down to the top 10 leading experts.

As ZS’s data science lead in India, Shankar helps drive the firm’s global advanced analytics capabilities. ZS’s offerings have grown under his leadership and are now powered by unstructured data, predictive analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence.

In addition to providing fact-based insights for enhanced decision-making in sales, marketing and Health Economics and Outcomes Research (HEOR) functions for more than 20 global life science companies, Shankar has held a number of roles in his 16 years at ZS including office managing principal in Pune and the business consulting capability group leader in India.

Shankar has a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from Purdue and a B.Tech from IIT Madras. While completing his doctoral thesis focused on artificial intelligence and operational research, he published 11 research papers on discrete event system representations to model batch process systems.